So Time named the person of the year [err people] Me!!! And you reading this, and everyone On Myspace, facebook and the like.

Kind of interesting, I mean there has been a TON of new social-networking, web 2.0 or whatever other buzzword you want to throw around this year. I guess sometimes I feel like it's just me, and the people around me that are caught up in the midst of it--but according to Time, it's not just me so congrats everybody!

I'm already pretty sick of the press and buzz around myself. . .but heck, I guess I deserve it.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

So my friend and fellow Williamsburger, Pat, fought the elements yesterday morning in a successful attempt to acquire the Nintendo Wii. A mere four hours in line and a hint of frostbite later, Pat was the lucky owner of a little white box the thickness of 3 dvds, 2 controllers that look like remote controls, and the game Wii sports [otherwise known as the future cure to childhood obesity].

The first thing we did was set up Pat's avatar [a.k.a. Mii]. His turned out pretty well, with square glasses, a hint of a beard, a rectangular shaped head, scruffy hair, etc. Our little hipster was officially in Wii World! My Mii on the otherhand, was, and continues to be heinous. The girls are a little harder to create in this game [or maybe it's just mii?]. Once we had our avatars set we were off to purchase some games. There's a lot of old favorites available [from regular to super Nintendo and Sega] but my favorite part is that when it downloads the game Fireball Mario runs across the screen catching coins and hitting his hand on the coin blocks [From the original Super Mario Brothers game of course]. Very clever.

The Wii comes with Wii Sports which includes bowling, golf, boxing, tennis, and baseball. Lots of fun to be had. All of the sports require an abbreviated version of the movement you would actually use--which was a bit of a problem for me since I was using, for example, my real baseball stance and my real tennis swing. [Luckily, I don't golf much]. But once you figure out that it doesn't need to be so exaggerated [and can actually hurt your game] it's pretty easy. I especially liked boxing. . .I'm embarrassed to say that my shoulders/arms are actually sore [it's quite the work out! Shows you how much exercise I get lately!] And I have to brag here that I kicked both Pat and Andrew's asses at boxing--only Andrew made it to a second round once.

About every 15-30 minutes or so there's a hilarious message that pops up saying "Maybe you should take a break? You can always press [x] to pause." I think it's great that they have to cover their asses from over-assertion, as opposed to normal video games that don't exercise anything but your thumbs. Well done Wii! I can't wait to get one of my own.

Friday, December 01, 2006

"Viral Learning Center". . Improve your videos today!

This 2 minute parody does an amazing job spoofing everything that's wrong with corporations or even an average joe purposely trying to create a viral video. Viral videos are a crap shoot--they can be really good, really bad, poorly produced, brilliantly shot--it doesn't matter. I personally believe trying too hard to make a video viral video will only make it unsuccessful.

The normal way to improve something is through a learning curve, learning from your mistakes and generating wisdom from experience. But the opposite is true in viral videos--people will not be willing to share or turn a video 'viral' if it's something that has been seen before. The video has to be fresh and inconsistent--those are fightin' words to big business. So I guess the only thing that you can learn is that it has to be completely new and different.

Additionally, viral videos have to be 'cool' [cool can be defined in many ways obviously]. If you think about the coolest of cool people [like say in high school. . .] they didn't try to hard, they just were 'cool.' Same rule can apply to viral videos, don't try too hard, just be cool. And if you are, your video will be shared organically.

I think my favorite part of the video is when he's explaining the types of things you'll learn like "working with excrement and vomit." Classic.